This paper analyzes empirically the relationship between money market uncertainty and unexpected deviations in retail interest rates in a sample of 10 OECD countries. We find that, with the exception of the US, money market uncertainty has only a modest impact on the conditional volatility of...

We develop a simple experimental setting to evaluate the role of the Taylor principle, which holds that the nominal interest rate has to respond more than one-for-one to fluctuations in the inflation rate to exert a stabilizing effect. In our setting, the average inflation rate fluctuates around...

Using a sign restrictions approach, we document that total factor productivity (TFP) moves counter-cyclically in the aftermath of supply and demand side shocks. To interpret our empirical results, we conduct counter-factual simulations, based on a New Keynesian DSGE model in which TFP fluctuates...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

According to the expectations channel, a fiscal consolidation may give rise to less contractionary, or even expansionary effects on consumption, despite a decline in current disposable income. Intuitively, people may accumulate a stock of savings in anticipation of the consolidation and may...

This paper investigates the business cycle implications of limited pass-through from market interest rates to retail interest rates based on a calibrated sticky price model. The main result of the paper is that limited interest rate pass-through reduces output volatility to a modest extent as...

In this article we investigate empirically the importance of labour market conditions and in particular the role of employment protection legislation as determinants of bilateral Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). We find that FDI flows are significantly higher in countries with relatively low...